Investigation: A child's death, despite warnings to Social Services, court

By Greg Barnes, staff writer

Saturday

Jun 4, 2016 at 12:01 AMJun 4, 2016 at 8:00 AM

Samantha Nacole Bryant wasn't fit to be a mother. That's what people kept trying to tell the Moore County Department of Social Services and a District Court judge.

And now Bryant's son, 23-month-old Rylan Ott, is dead.

The little boy with the strawberry-blond hair drowned in a pond in April after wandering about a half-mile away from his home near Carthage.

There had been persistent warnings that Rylan wasn't safe in his home. One of the first came in October, when Social Services removed Rylan and his 13-year-old sister from Bryant's care after sheriff's deputies charged her with misdemeanor child abuse, resisting arrest and assault on a government official. Documents filed in Moore County District Court show that Bryant was involuntarily committed to a hospital's psychiatric ward that day.

Bryant, 30, went to court three weeks later, on Nov. 19. She thought she would be getting her children back that day. When it didn't happen, she reportedly sent her lawyer a text message with the tone of a suicide note.

Those weren't the only warning signs.

Pam Reed, who investigated the case as a volunteer with Guardian Ad Litem, said another child had been removed from Bryant's custody years earlier in Texas.

And Bryant's neighbors in Moore County said Rylan used to wander all over the neighborhood unsupervised.

One of those neighbors, Julie Ahouse, recounted her brief relationship with Bryant.

"She was probably one of the most irresponsible people that I have ever met," Ahouse said.

Despite the evidence, Moore County District Court Judge Scott C. Etheridge ruled Dec. 17 that Rylan would be reunited with his mother.

Etheridge said it was clear the case met the minimum standards for reunification. In North Carolina, the goal is to reunite the biological parents with their children if those standards are met.

Four months after Rylan was returned to his mother, the boy who loved to play in the water was dead. His mother has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and child neglect.

Officials with the courts and the child welfare system charged with protecting the child say the process which returned Rylan to his mother - a process which is cloaked in secrecy - worked appropriately.

Moore County sheriff's reports state that Samantha Bryant was drunk the afternoon of Oct. 25, when a dispute broke out at her singlewide trailer off Branch Pond Road, a rutted dirt path in the countryside between Carthage and Whispering Pines.

The report marks a deputy's time of arrival as 2:28 p.m and says that an AR-15 rifle and a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol were seized.

The next day, a document was filed in Moore County District Court seeking to place Rylan and his teenage sister in nonsecure custody - a foster home.

The document says that Bryant had been involuntarily committed the day of her arrest "due to intoxication and violent behavior." Another document shows she repeatedly kicked a deputy while she was being handcuffed.

The document for custody shows that a Fort Bragg soldier identified as her boyfriend had been drinking alcohol and snorting Klonopin, a prescription drug that is used to block seizures or anxiety but is sometimes abused. The boyfriend, a member of a military police unit at Fort Bragg, was trying to get Rylan's sister to use the drug, the document says.

The soldier was "in full military gear and armed with weapons" when deputies arrived, according to the document. Rylan's sister and her friend were found hiding in a closet, from which Reed said they had called 911.

Documents do not indicate whether the soldier was arrested.

After the incident, Rylan and his sister spent a few days in a foster home before a relative in Texas placed a call to Shane and Amanda Mills asking whether they would be willing to take custody of the children while their mother's case worked itself through the system, Shane Mills said.

Rylan's sister had been friends with their daughter. The couple agreed to become what is known as kinship parents. Bryant was permitted to visit her children in the Millses' home for a couple of hours a day, three times a week.

The Millses expected a social worker to accompany the mother on at least some of those home visits, but they say that never happened.

Shane Mills, a sergeant at Fort Bragg, said the social worker showed up at two medical visits for the children. He said she never stepped foot in their home.

If she had, Shane Mills said, she likely would have witnessed behavior that grew to make the Millses fearful of Bryant.

Bryant's visits got off to a bad start from the first day, when she showed up late, Mills said. Bryant immediately started yelling and cursing at her daughter, who ran upstairs crying, he said.

During several visits, Mills said, Bryant told her daughter: "'I don't care what happens to you; I only want the boy.' This was over and over and over."

Two weeks later, Bryant attended her first court hearing, the one where she expected to get her children back.

When that didn't happen, Bryant sent the text message to her lawyer. Amy Mathews, an acquaintance of Bryant's, saved a copy of the message:

"Today I was proven from more than one person of the horrible person that I am and that I put my kids in harm's way, which I would have never done if I was sober. I am a horrible person and for that I deal with pain and agony day after day, which I mentally cannot handle nor face.

"I love my babies more than anything in this world and to continue to have to leave them and be without them is driving me insane, which my medicine does not ease in any way.

"Without them I have no life. ... I was supposed to be with them and I failed at that. Now I live every day fighting my own worst enemy, which is myself."

After receiving the text, Mathews said, Bryant's boyfriend and others went looking for her. They found her unresponsive outside the boyfriend's home on Fort Bragg, she said.

When Bryant regained consciousness, Mathews said, she became angry and demanded her pills. Mathews said she encouraged Bryant to seek psychiatric treatment at Womack Army Medical Center, but she refused.

Pam Reed, the volunteer for Guardian Ad Litem, said she joined the case the following day. A Guardian Ad Litem advocate is appointed by the court to investigate and find solutions that are in the best interest of an abused child.

During her investigation, Reed said, she learned that Bryant had had a horrendous childhood. She said Bryant spent much of her youth in foster homes, gave birth at the age of 13 or 14 and soon lost custody.

"Her background is such that there was a generational failure with the system," Reed said.

In January 2015, she said, Bryant moved to Fort Bragg to be with her husband, Corey Ott, who deployed overseas shortly after her arrival.

By the time Ott returned in September, Bryant had left him for the other soldier, Reed said.

Reed reluctantly agreed to be interviewed for this story. As a worker for Guardian Ad Litem, she had taken an oath of confidentiality, vowing not to disclose any private details of her cases.

Reed said she took the oath seriously. But when Etheridge gave Bryant back her son, she felt she could not stay silent.

Reed said she was so upset with Etheridge's decision and with how the case was handled that she withdrew from it. Now she questions whether that was the best decision.

"I feel like I failed this child by walking away from this case," Reed said. "That's why I'm trying to make it right, by coming forward."

Reed said Guardian Ad Litem let her go after she resigned from Rylan's case. She said the district supervisor has called her and sent her a letter reminding her of the confidentiality oath she took.

But Reed wants people to know what happened, in the hope that changes will be made.

"I resigned because I could not stomach what I observed," she said. "I knew that this was a recipe for disaster."

On Dec. 4, Shane Mills said, he and his wife signed Social Services paperwork stating that the relationship between them and Bryant had become so untenable that they wanted the unsupervised visits to stop.

"We didn't feel safe with her there any longer," said Amanda Mills, a stay-at-home mother of three.

Two weeks later, Dec. 17, Shane Mills stood outside Judge Etheridge's courtroom, talking to Reed's Guardian Ad Litem supervisor. Mills said he was told that the case wasn't going in their favor because Social Services didn't have the money nor the resources to repeatedly cart Bryant's children from the Millses' home on Fort Bragg to the agency's offices in Carthage, about a 45-minute drive each way.

"Basically, it was an inconvenience for them so they were going to push for placement with the mother," Mills said.

Reed said she was told the same thing.

When he took the stand, Mills said, Social Services lawyer Ward Medlin raised an objection to - and the judge sustained - every question about Bryant's behavior that Mills tried to answer.

"I tried to give truthful responses but was always cut off," he said.

Reed said she was also stymied at every turn. In her investigative report, Reed said, she had requested that caseworkers complete four successful supervised visits with Bryant at the county Child Protective Services office. She said she also recommended that Bryant undergo a full psychological evaluation. Reed said it wasn't revealed in court that a Child Protective Services worker had made no supervised visits with Bryant, a fact Reed said she was unaware of at the time.

Reed said she urged the court for more time before deciding whether Bryant should get Rylan back. She said she wanted to ensure that Bryant was ready and able to properly care for the boy.

"These are children," Reed said. "This is not a budget decision.... This is something that I believe to be a really unproven home, an unproven environment, and this mother was not ready."

She said he questioned words she used to describe Bryant's behavior, such as "hostile" and "very volatile." What qualifications, she said Medlin wanted to know, did she have on which to base those assessments? Reed was a volunteer, not a social worker or a psychologist.

Reed said she had been with Guardian Ad Litem for three years. In that time, she said, she had been assigned to a dozen cases involving 18 children. In every one of those cases where a disagreement happened, she said, a judge would strike a compromise between Social Services and Guardian Ad Litem.

This time, Reed said, Etheridge didn't seek a compromise. He assigned custody of Rylan to his mother and his sister to her father in Texas.

While Medlin said he was prohibited from talking about a specific case, he did say the court hears all child welfare cases to their fullest. He also said Etheridge is a respected judge who is often asked to speak at seminars across the state about ethics and other issues.

After the ruling, Reed and the Millses said, the social worker assigned to the case told them the decision was not what she had wanted.

The social worker, who did not return phone calls, had been handed Bryant's case less than two months after she was hired in September. It is not clear what work she had done previously. Denise Brook, the county's human resources director, said that information is confidential.

After the hearing, Mills said, he waited for Etheridge to leave the courtroom. Mills wanted to know how the judge could have made such a ruling.

Mills said Etheridge told him that he once had another case in which a woman threatened suicide if her children were taken from her. In that case, Mills said he was told, the woman followed through with the threat.

Mills said Etheridge told him he didn't want that to happen again.

Etheridge says he told Mills no such thing.

The day after Etheridge's ruling, the social worker went to the Millses' home to pick up Rylan and his sister.

Amanda Mills recounted what the social worker told her before leaving:

"We were upset and saying our goodbyes, and she said, 'Off the record, this is not what I was pushing for, but I assure you I will be out to check on them frequently."

Rylan's sister never left North Carolina. She is now in a therapeutic foster home.

Rylan died April 14. His body was sent to relatives in Texas for burial.

Etheridge, Medlin and county Social Services Director John L. Benton said they could not discuss specifics of the case because doing so would violate confidentiality laws.

"I wish I could lay it all out and then you would understand, but I can't," Etheridge said.

Etheridge has been on the bench for 14 years. He is certified as a juvenile court judge and has presided over countless child custody cases.

He said there are rules for admitting evidence during a hearing that must be followed.

"If evidence was kept out, it is because they didn't comport with what is admissible," he said. "The rules are in place to ensure that everyone gets due process."

The criteria when deciding a custody case is not whether the child is better off living with the foster parents. Most children would be, Etheridge said.

In North Carolina, the goal is to reunite the child with his biological parent or parents. If the Department of Social Services can demonstrate that minimum safe standards for the child have been met, Etheridge said, the judge has little choice but to rule in favor of reunification.

"If they address all of the issues, we have to return the child," he said.

Etheridge is confident that, in Rylan's case, his decision was the only one he or any other judge could have made.

"On the evidence that was presented, this decision would get made 10 times out of 10," he said.

Etheridge said he remembers Shane Mills speaking to him after court. He said he thanked Mills for his military service and for being a foster parent. He said he remembers Mills asking him about his ruling.

But he said he never told Mills that his decision was based on a previous case in which a mother threatened to commit suicide if she lost her child.

Etheridge said he has never handled such a case.

"So, I don't know where they are getting that," he said.

Reed summed up Etheridge's response in one word: "Baloney."

She said the court was told about Bryant's erratic behavior. The system is behind a wall of confidentiality because minor children are involved, and "there is no reporting or accountability of what DSS recommends or of what the court decides," Reed said in an email.

"The CPS (Child Protective Services) system is granted complete secrecy and a fatality like Rylan's is virtually the only information that is disclosed about CPS's failure to act - and that in turn prevents accountability," she said.

The secrecy also removes public scrutiny from the actions of the court system and judges, she said.

Mills stands by his story that Etheridge told him he based his ruling on the other woman following through with her suicide threat. Mills said Etheridge not only told him after announcing his decision, he made the same remark in the courtroom. Reed said she heard him say it, too.

About two weeks after Rylan's death, Julie Ahouse sat on an orange riding lawnmower, tears streaming down her face, as she talked about Bryant's inability to ensure the toddler's safety.

Ahouse said she moved into a house across the road from Bryant shortly after the incident that led to Bryant's arrest on Oct. 25.

Ahouse said she was afraid of Bryant's boyfriend, who along with his friends used to target practice in Bryant's front yard. Once, she said, she found bullet holes in her garage.

Stephanie Calcutt moved into a trailer directly behind Bryant's about four months before Rylan's death. Calcutt said that she got along fine with Bryant and that she never saw her drinking. Their children played together.

But Calcutt said that she, too, often noticed Rylan wandering unattended. On two or three occasions, she said, they helped look for him.

Ahouse said she considered reporting Bryant to Social Services, and regrets that she didn't.

The day he died, Ahouse said, Rylan spent much of the morning at her house as she and family members erected an electric fence for their horses. She said Rylan was unattended then, too.

The judge's ruling did not remove Social Services from the case. Reed said a social worker was expected to continue monitoring Bryant and her family. Whether that happened is unknown.

What is known is that, on April 14, Bryant went to Calcutt's home asking if she had seen Rylan.

Calcutt said Bryant was calm at first, "then panicking, crying, all upset."

A search party set out to look for him. Initially, no one checked the pond. They didn't think Rylan would have wandered off that far.

A neighbor found his body in a corner of the pond late that afternoon.

Ahouse and Reed say they feel partly responsible, but they cannot fathom Etheridge's decision to reunite Rylan with his mother.

Neither can Shane and Amanda Mills.

"Our hearts are shattered over Rylan's death," Amanda Mills wrote in an email. "We loved that precious baby like one of our own children, and I just pray that this story touches people's hearts, and they will fight to make a difference, so no other child or family will have to pay the ultimate sacrifice."

Staff writer Greg Barnes can be reached at barnesg@fayobserver.com or 486-3525.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Amy Mathews' name.

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